Thursday, February 16, 2017

Trump and Fascism - Articles about Trump, Fascism, Mind Control and Propaganda

Trump and Fascism - Articles about Trump, Fascism, Mind Control and Propaganda
Trump and Fascism
This page is a data dump of articles about Donald Trump, those working with Trump and historical articles about fascism. Fascism uses different types of mind control to control people. Donald Trump has been accused of using propaganda and mind control techniques to win the election, to control people’s opinions of him and to control their opinions of other topics. This page contains excerpts from articles related to this topic.
https://ritualabuse.us/mindcontrol/trump-and-fascism/

"Our own research shows that tyranny does not result from blind conformity to rules and roles, it is a creative act of followership that flows from identification with authorities who represent vicious acts as virtuous," he said.

A new study has shown that terrible acts involve not just obedience, but enthusiasm too.

The scientific paper - jointly authored by by a Scottish university professor - challenges a long-held belief that human beings harm others because they are programmed to obey orders.

Professor Stephen Reicher, Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of St Andrews, and Professor Alex Haslam of the University of Queensland, Australia, have published the paper in the journal PLos-Biology on the nature of tyranny and evil.

It comes 50 years after social psychological studies showed that even decent people can engage in acts of extreme cruelty when instructed to do so by others.

The beliefs can be traced back to two research study conducted by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Milgram's research showed that people blindly obey the orders of an authority figure, while Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) revealed that people will take on abusive roles uncritically.

But, after a decade-long program of research, Reicher and Haslam have challenged the conclusions of both.

Professor Reicher said: "In short, people do harm not because they are unaware that they are doing wrong, but because they believe that they are doing right.

"It is this conviction that steels participants to do their dirty work, and that makes them act energetically and creatively to ensure its success."

The study began when the two researchers ran their own prison experiment, which was broadcast by the BBC in 2002. This showed that people did not automatically slip into role.

They found the guards only acted tyrannically when they believed that harsh measures were necessary to create order.

More recently, Professors Reicher and Haslam have conducted a series of studies which revisit Milgram's conclusions.

These show that people only go along with an authority when they believe that they are serving a greater good.

Paradoxically, they show that giving orders tends to undermine this belief and hence undermines obedience.

Although the findings of Zimbardo and Milgram remain highly influential, Professor Haslam suggests their conclusions do not hold up well under scrutiny.

"Our own research shows that tyranny does not result from blind conformity to rules and roles, it is a creative act of followership that flows from identification with authorities who represent vicious acts as virtuous," he said.

MILLER: Well, I think that it's been an important reminder to all Americans that we have a judiciary that has taken far too much power and become, in many cases, a supreme branch of government. One unelected judge in Seattle cannot remake laws for the entire country. I mean this is just crazy, John, the idea that you have a judge in Seattle say that a foreign national living in Libya has an effective right to enter the United States is -- is -- is beyond anything we've ever seen before.

The end result of this, though, is that our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.

Several weeks after this story published in October, Spencer gave a triumphant speech at a conference in Washington describing America as a "white country" and proclaiming, "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!" He was met with cheers and Nazi salutes. Read more in our investigation of how the white nationalist movement capitalized on the Trump campaign.

After graduating high school in 1997, Spencer went to the University of Virginia, where he double-majored in music and English and became deeply involved in avant-garde theater, trying out and discarding various radical ideologies like costume changes. The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche made a lasting impression; Spencer found his critiques of equality and democracy darkly compelling. He identified with the German philosopher's unapologetically elitist embrace of "great men" such as Napoleon Bonaparte and the composer Richard Wagner. Yet Spencer found little in Nietzsche about the organization of the state; it was only after entering the humanities master's program at the University of Chicago that he discovered Jared Taylor, a self-proclaimed "race realist" who argues that blacks and Hispanics are a genetic drag on Western society.

White Nationalists See Trump as Their Troll in Chief. Is He With Them Mother Jones
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/trump-white-nationalists-hate-racism-power
Trump "may be the last hope for a president who would be good for white people," remarked Jared Taylor, who runs a "race realist" site called American Renaissance and once founded a think tank that became notorious for declaring that blacks are "more dangerous" than whites.
Donald Trump’s Vanity Is Destroying His Presidency
The presidency isn’t changing Donald Trump. It’s revealing who he has always been.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/02/donald-trump-vanity-destroying-presidency
Americans witnessed this childish display throughout the 2016 campaign and, it seems, his fans approved. They cheered his rhetorical assault on the establishment, the status quo, bien-pensant thinking and sensibilities. Trump’s core support never wavered, even when he ripped into the looks of Alicia Machado, or dismissed allegations of sexual harassment by claiming his accusers were not attractive enough to warrant his attention, or when he retweeted an image contrasting a less-than-flattering photo of Ted Cruz’s wife with a stunning shot of his wife, Melania (his third spouse, all three of whom were former models).

This translates into a fixation on how Trump himself is perceived, too. That’s why he could not stop talking about how well he was doing in polls and how many people showed up to his rallies. It’s why he insisted that Mexicans loved him even as he called them “rapists” and repeatedly promised to build a wall to keep “bad hombres” out of the United States. Only Trump alone would be able to save the American people from the dismal picture he painted of the state of the nation, because he was the smartest, the best deal-maker, the most respected, he would say. Perhaps this is why, too, as his doctor admitted in a recent interview with The New York Times, Trump takes a prostate-related drug, Propecia, to ward off male-pattern baldness.

Well, this weekly report that he has called for recalls a number of things from the past that we have seen before, which is this move to isolate and identify and then vilify a vulnerable minority community in order to move against it. When he—I just went back last night and reread his speech from when he declared his candidacy, and the Mexican rapist comment was in from the beginning, and so this has been a theme throughout. And we see back in Nazi Germany there was a paper called—a Nazi paper called Der Stürmer, and they had a department called "Letter Box," and readers were invited to send in stories of supposed Jewish crimes. And Der Stürmer would publish them, and they would include some pretty horrific graphic illustrations of these crimes, as well. And there was even a sort of a lite version of it, if you will, racism lite, in which the Neues Volk, which was more like a Look or a Life magazine, which normally highlighted beautiful Aryan families and their beautiful homes, would run a feature like "The Criminal Jew," and they would show photos of "Jewish-looking," as they called it, people who represented different kinds of crimes that one ought to watch out for from Jews.

President Trump today at the White House. The New York attorney general says Democratic AGs are considering challenging state corporate charters of the president's businesses.

A liberal advocacy group on Wednesday called upon New York State to investigate whether the Trump Organization has engaged in fraud and illegal activity, and consider revoking its corporate charter.

The request is not falling on deaf ears.

New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman provided no specifics but told NPR a charter challenge is indeed part of a broader discussion among Democratic attorneys general about President Trump's business holdings.

"Our goal here is not to scramble around looking for ways to get Trump," he said of the Democratic AGs' strategy, but "there will be litigation relating to his [Trump's] failure to divest."

His comments came after a group called Free Speech For People presented Schneiderman's office with a 24-page letter, outlining concerns about the Trump company's past legal infractions, including settlements involving housing discrimination charges in the 1970s and recent fraud allegations involving Trump University.

It also raises questions about whether Trump might be receiving foreign payments in ways that would violate the U.S. Constitution.

Here's the issue: As a businessman, Trump has financial interests in hundreds of companies spread over about 20 countries, all grouped together under the Trump Organization umbrella. And as president, Trump could make policy decisions that could enhance the value of his businesses, creating ethical conflicts.

The Free Speech For People letter reads: "By continuing to operate under Trump family ownership and control with President Trump in the White House, the Trump Organization flagrantly abuses its state-granted powers, contrary to the public policies of New York against corruption and conflicts of interest, and contrary to the U.S. Constitution."

The group's outside counsel Jonathan Abady said in a conference call that "the president is converting the Oval Office into his own personal candy store."

Trump has taken no steps to sell off his business interests to end the conflicts, although he has been filing legal paperwork to remove himself from management of his New York-based company, which owns real estate, golf, hotel and other businesses. He has turned over management to his two oldest sons.

The bureaucracy, the press, the judiciary, and the public are not only pushing back, they’re having some success.

Nothing Donald Trump has done since becoming President is particularly surprising. The attacks on judges and the press, the clash of civilizations worldview, the ignorance of public policy, the blurring of government service and private gain, the endless lying, the incompetence, the chaos—all were vividly foreshadowed during the campaign. The Republican-led Congress’ refusal to challenge Trump was foreseeable too. The number of Republicans willing to oppose Trump’s agenda pretty much equals the number who refused to endorse him once he became the GOP nominee.

What Does It Mean to Have 'Repeated Contacts' With Russian Intelligence?

Less predictable has been the response of other elements of the American political system: The bureaucracy, the press, the judiciary and the public. Here, the news is good. So far, they’re not only pushing back, they’re having some success.

The latest example is the resignation of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Flynn’s resignation is a welcome development both because he held crudely bigoted views of Muslims and because he was unable to competently manage the foreign policy process. But that’s not why he lost his job. He lost his job because of an independent bureaucracy and a vigorous press.

CNN’s Brian Stelter has reconstructed the chain of events. On January 12, a “senior U.S. government official” told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius that, “Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the [Russian] hacking” of the presidential election. Three days later, CBS’ John Dickerson asked Vice President Mike Pence about the call, and Pence insisted that Flynn had not discussed “anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia.”

But the Washington Post followed up, citing “nine current and former officials” who claimed that Flynn had discussed exactly that. The New York Times reported that there was a transcript of the call. Eventually, it became impossible to deny that Flynn had lied, and caused Pence to lie. If the Trump administration had been able to deny reality, as it so often does, Flynn would likely still have his job. But good reporters, aided by government sources, made that impossible. As the Columbia Journalism Review notes, “it wasn’t the lying that got him [Flynn] fired; it’s that his lying leaked to the press”

Another leak to the Times forced the Trump administration to abandon an executive order re-opening the CIA “black sites” that the Bush administration used to torture suspected terrorists. And according to the Times, it was a leak that alerted Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner to a draft executive order repealing protections for LGBT federal employees, which they then quashed. Trump and his top advisors are so alarmed by the leaks that, according to Politico, they’re searching the phones and computers of NSC staff.

But no president faced with a dissatisfied bureaucracy and a vigorous press has been able to keep the internal workings of government secret. And Trump is facing the most energized American press corps in decades. America’s prestige newspapers have seen dramatic increases in circulation over the last year. The Post alone recently announced that it was hiring sixty new journalists. Trump, in Jack Shafer’s words, “is making journalism great again,” and great journalism is, to some degree, restraining his power.https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/american-institutions-are-fighting-back-against-trump/516759/
Donald Trump National Security Adviser Mike Flynn Has Called Islam 'a Cancer'

The man whom President-elect Donald Trump picked as his national security adviser has said he doesn’t believe that all cultures are “morally equivalent” and once described Islam as "a cancer," comments that have many in the Muslim community worried about what his new job might mean for them.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn served as an adviser to Trump on national security and foreign policy throughout the presidential campaign. Flynn has said he agreed with Trump's initial proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States, but told Al Jazeera earlier this year it likely "wouldn't work," and that he supports the vetting of Muslims coming from Syria and places where terrorism is a major threat. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-national-security-adviser-mike-flynn-called/story?id=43575658

Impeach Trump: Ohio Republican judge
We can't let him get away with the 'dozens of dazzlingly illegal things Trump has already done.'

A president of the United States, on the official @POTUS Twitter feed, assails a department store for dropping his daughter’s merchandise. On the same day, the Pentagon is looking to rent space in the Trump Tower. Trump’s son travels to Uganda to make a Trump business deal. And, of course, foreign diplomats will stay at the Trump Hotel. The cash comes marching in.

The phony legalisms Trump has said he used to “separate” himself from his businesses – though he still owns them and his sons are running them – will be cited to make this all acceptable. Horsefeathers. No ethical expert could say with a straight face that this is not a classic conflict of interest.

In any time except our post-factual era, no office holder, much less the president, could get away with any one of the dozens of dazzlingly illegal things Trump has already done. They would forfeit office immediately.

The leader of the band of Mad Hatters occupying the White House has already insulted allied world leaders, issued illegal and badly written orders, impugned a “so-called” judge appointed by his own party, and appointed the least-qualified cabinet ever. The first secretary of state was Thomas Jefferson. Trump appointed a big-oil executive with close ties to Russia. The first treasury secretary was Alexander Hamilton. Trump appointed a former Goldman Sachs exec who got rich foreclosing on homeowners. The national security advisor lasted 24 days.

Basic American values — free speech, the rule of law, separation of powers, even common decency — are unknown in this White House. We now have a president who has no concept of separation of powers, or why we have three branches of government. If he knew anything about the Constitution, he would know the framers envisioned just the situation we have now — a would-be dictator. They provided checks and balances — such as an independent judiciary to protect us from presidential tyranny.http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/02/15/trump-impeach-flynn-ivanka-tweet-russia-column/97944818/

Trump's secretary of labor pick Andrew Puzder withdraws nomination
Puzder came under scrutiny after admitting earlier this month that he had employed an undocumented worker for years and revelations that his ex-wife alleged in 1990 that he abused her. She has since withdrawn those allegations, and Puzder — whose confirmation hearing was set for tomorrow after being rescheduled four times — has denied wrongdoing.

Puzder's withdrawal marks the first unsuccessful nomination of the Trump administration. Eleven of his 23 Cabinet-level picks are yet to be confirmed.